The continuing saga of the Britney/suicide problem with AJAX

Via PaidContent, it was interesting to read Avenue A/Razorfish’s 2007 Digital Outlook Report which, as with most analyst reports, tells us things we already know. In this case, it tells us that page views are becoming obsolete in this increasingly AJAXified world, and some other way of monetising dynamically updated Web content has to be found:

AJAX Metrics and Time-Based Ad Serving. Analytic tools are already capable of measuring AJAX interactions. They simply monitor the number of requests to a server AJAX makes (known as an “event”), which allows us to infer interactivity. However, that’s still not a replacement for the page-view metric. Instead, look for this AJAX measurement to trigger timebased ad serving (e.g., the serving of ads, which refresh, over a given span of time). This seems like a much more appropriate tactic given the sheer amount of time users are spending while consuming audio and video online today.

This little pony would be nice to ride, but I'm not holding my breath. Apart from the technical, political and economic problems getting the ad providers to engage with this or some similar new model, there is also the issue of the Britney/suicide problem - where contextual ad content which is fed into an AJAX-flavoured page may be catastrophically unrelated to the updated content which has appeared since the initial load - which I blogged about almost a year ago and was talking about on the WebMasterWorld forums 18 months ago. There has been no indication that the GEMAYA ad network players have even spent any time on this dilemma, busy as they are working on audio/video content, defending lawsuits and other stepping stones on the path of global domination.

It's a sticky situation. Get it? Sticky! Aaahahaha, I kill me sometimes.